Posts about social journalism

I’ve said — to the horror of surprisingly few journalists I know — that the mere fact of Donald Trump’s candidacy is evidence of the failure of journalism to perform its prime function: informing the public.

Here I want to ask what we could do about that. I’ll explore ways to better reflect and inform the worldview of the petri dish that bred Trump: the angry, underemployed, conservative, white man. I’ll argue that the answer begins with empathy — empathy not with Trump’s racism, misogyny, and hatred, of course, but with the real lives of at least some of the people who are considering voting for him.

Of course, it’s true — and I want to underscore this — that many unreflected and under-served communities deserve to be addressed ahead of angry white men: African-Americans of many ages and locales, Latinos of many diasporas, the disabled of many needs, LGBTQ people, women, youth. But none of those communities fostered the movement of Trumpism, which — no matter the electoral outcome — will continue to fester after November. They have spawned a civic emergency. The phenomenon must be confronted. Decent Americans of the right need to be better informed, for ignorance breeds hate. The first step to doing that is not lecturing but listening.

Reflect communities: I wrote recently that as an enthusiastic Hillary Clinton supporter, I now know better what it feels like to find myself not reflected in media. I’ll repeat that my experience is, of course, trivial next to that of minorities and under-served communities who should have received more attention for generations. But this moment has helped me better understand how journalism also failed conservatives by not reflecting their worldview, circumstances, needs, and goals. Because media demonstrated that we did not hear, care about, or understand them, they did not trust the rest of what we had to tell them. Because we did not better reflect their lives, we could not help other communities and political leaders understand, empathize with, and grapple with their needs.

In Social Journalism, I have come to call this task externally focused journalism: We tell your story to the rest of society so others can understand and take into account your needs in negotiating policy and politics. That is what journalism has always done and will continue to do. It is helpful. However, externally focused journalism also can be exploitative: the journalist helicopters in to grab a good but random story and then leaves with no assurance of change. This is why I also emphasize the need for internally focused journalism; I will get to that below.

If you want to better understand the rocky soil that fertilized Trump, I recommend reading J.D. Vance’s Hillbilly Elegy, a highly personal tale that also explains the context of declining hope for a large class deep inside America. At the same time, to understand what necessitated #BlackLivesMatter, I recommend Between the World and Me by my former CUNY J-school colleague Ta-Nahisi Coates.

These books are credible, eloquent, and effective because they spring from experience. They demonstrate why American newsrooms must diversify their staffs. But it’s not as if every slice of the nation will be represented in every newsroom. So it is vital that we also teach journalists how to seek out, listen to, and empathize with people who are not like them. That, we’ve learned, is the essence of Social Journalism: taking a caring heart and an anthropologist’s cool eye and ear to observe and listen to a community’s situation so we can improve the connections that community has with others and improve the relationship of the journalist to the community — to say: “I want to understand you.”

As an example of such journalism, I commend to you New York Times religion reporter Laurie Goodstein’s recent story: Torn Over Donald Trump and Cut Off by Culture Wars, Evangelicals Despair. As Slate says, it is written with gentle empathy. I don’t agree with the stands against gay marriage taken by the people in the story. I don’t need to. Thanks to Goodstein’s story, I can at least understand their world a bit better. Assignment editors should have been devoting journalistic resource to just such stories during this election, and to reporting on the issues that matter to many communities across this land. That would have given us all a better understanding of what is at stake in the political struggle over the nation’s future. It would have been a better use of resource than predicting the horse race day after day.

To see how true to life Goodstein’s story was, I called one of her sources, Pastor Ryan Jorgenson, who emphasized to me that her reporting and the story were effective and empathetic. He had only three additional observations: First, his parishioners noted that the Times headline — “Evangelicals Despair” — is oxymornic; if you understand evangelicals, they said, you would know that because of their faith they do not despair. Second, though Jorgenson said the photographer shot the life of the church, the photo editor in New York selected only photos that reflected the headline — despair. Third, though he was glad that the story quoted him saying Jesus’ name, Jorgenson was disappointed though unsurprised that it did not quote scripture as the best explanation of evangelical thinking. (“We are troubled on every side, yet not distressed; we are perplexed, but not in despair.” 2 Corinthians 4:8.) When was the last time you saw the Bible — or the Koran — quoted in media? Note well that it is the structure of news organizations — namely, editing — that can separate the journalism from the community it would cover. Our processes interfere with empathy.

When this election is over and when we enter into a post mortem for the truth, we need to examine how existing media can better reflect the many diverse communities that make up America: their lives, worldviews, concerns, needs, goals. But that will take us only so far.

Diversify media: Not only must newsrooms be diversified but the landscape of media should be diversified. There is not enough — there is almost no — major conservative media that is responsible, fact-based, and journalistic. We in liberal media — and, yes, for God’s sake, let us be honest enough to confess that media are liberal — left a vacuum that was readily and eagerly filled by the far and alt right, by political movements masquerading as media: Fox News, Breitbart, Drudge, et al. Fox News just turned 20 years old; see what it has done to civil discourse and democracy in a generation.

The closest thing the right has to a responsible major media outlet is the Wall Street Journal but it’s still a business newspaper, its coverage is locked behind a pay wall for the well to do (not many Trump voters), and it is owned by the proprietor of Fox News and the New York Post. No, it won’t do.

So I have an odd suggestion: liberal media and liberal funders should invest in responsible conservative news outlets staffed by journalists and commentators who share a conservative worldview: an intelligent and reasonable Fox News, a right-of-center New York Times, an American Telegraph, and a civil and honest Rush Limbaugh.

The idea of “balance” in any one media outlet has turned out to be as deceiving and bankrupt as the idea of “objectivity” — indeed, worse, for false balance is used to justify friction and fighting on the air and the damaging, uninformative scourge of the “surrogate” in this election. After helping tomanufacture the Trump phenomenon, CNN actually believes hiring Corey Lewandowski provides balance. That’s not about informing the public. That’s not about journalism. That’s about producing entertainment.

No, there needs to be balance in the ecosystem of news: different perspectives, experiences, and worldviews represented and served by their own outlets. What enables each of these entities to work legitimately under the banner of journalism? Intellectual honesty: the willingness to share uncomfortable truths; an ethic built on facts; a mission to inform.

Yes, I had hoped that blogs, my beloved blogs, would provide an outlet for such diversity of viewpoint. To an extent, they have and I still celebrate that. But this, too, is not nearly enough.

Keep in mind that if reasonable people do not start media to serve reasonable conservatives, the market will be dominated not just by the present noxious media movements but soon possibly by one even worse: The Trump News Channel. Beware!

Why bother? you ask. Surely I don’t think that we are going to be able to turn all of Trump’s 40-odd million voters into informed, reasonable neighbors who now see the error of his ways. No, I don’t. But if we could better inform a quarter, a tenth of them, imagine the benefit. When decent and smart conservatives set about the task of detrumpification and rebuilding their party and movement from the ashes, where can they turn? Today, all they have is a news hell. That is what we have left them. We have a responsibility to serve them.

Serve people: What does journalism serving people mean? It doesn’t mean talking to or about them. That is externally focused journalism. Journalism as service means helping people improve their lives and communities by serving their information needs so they can solve their problems and meet their goals. That is internally focused journalism.

For the sake of example, let’s take one adjective from my earlier characterization of Trump’s angry, underemployed, conservative, white, male constituency. Take “underemployed.” How could journalism better serve people — any people — who need jobs?

In the old days, we in the news business exploited unemployment by charging high rates to advertise jobs. We considered this a good because it supported journalism. But once my friend Craig Newmark came along as — in his description — a philanthropist of classified ads and more importantly once the net killed the middleman, newspapers’ jobs classified business (which could earn any one metro paper in the U.S. upwards of $30 to $50 million a year) collapsed.

Now I would suggest that a news operation should create a data base ofevery job available — for free. Let’s not just post short, uninformative ads (which said so little because we charged so much). No, collect data about every job and every job requirement: what skills are needed and what prior jobs people held to prepare them for posts like these. Let’s create a matching service that collects job-seekers’ skills and qualifications. Let’s create a service that helps the unemployed see what skills they need to get jobs. Let’s consider creating online education to help people build skills; that is one way we can make money.

Do media have the power to solve unemployment? No, of course not. But we can help. That should be our goal always: to contribute to solutions. The real benefit of doing this is that we can build trust. We can show that we do have the interests of the underemployed at heart. Then perhaps we can begin to have discussions with them based on facts over emotions. They might listen when we show them that their competition for work may not be immigrants but technology. We can have an informed discussion about the jobs that would be lost if foreign trade were curtailed. Maybe then they’d be more informed and less prey to the fear-mongering, bigoted, xenophobic likes of Trump, Breitbart, and Drudge.

Convene communities: At a news editors’ convention in Philadelphia a few weeks ago, I helped run an exercise in so-called human-centered design. After listening to some folks from gentrifying neighborhoods in the city, the editors in the room could clearly see something that was missing: conversation among the communities there. They could also clearly see the need and opportunity: convening those communities into dialogue.

Let’s say that we have diverse newsrooms that do a better job of reflecting communities’ concerns. Let’s say we have a more diverse media ecosystem that better serves many communities. Let’s say that media outlets do a better job of serving their communities and building trusted relationships with them. All this does only so much good if communities become more isolated.

Our next job in media is to convene communities into conversation. I’ve learned this in our Social Journalism classes at CUNY, where our students have taught me that serving a community also means connecting that community with others.

Thus media should convene and inform conversations among whites and blacks, young African-American men and police, immigrants and the native-born, evangelicals and liberals, consumers and corporations, left and right.

A week ago on Meet the Press, Chuck Todd teased a conversation between Michael Moore and Glenn Beck. Oh, no, I thought: here comes the ultimate cable-news war segment, the return of Crossfire — war! But no, it was the opposite. The segment was thoughtful, even peaceful. Michael Moore lamented the large swaths of America who believe they are unheard (see above). Then Glenn Beck appeared — separately — saying he didn’t necessarily want a record of agreeing with the prior guest he would not name, but he did agree with Michael Moore about the frustration of the unheard Americans. Watch. Here we saw a moment of bridge-building. That, too, is a responsible media’s job.

I’m pursuing this because I’m suffering an existential crisis as a journalist, ashamed of the role my profession and industry have played as Trump’s publicity agents, worried about the record-low measures of trust in American journalism, and most of all deeply disappointed by the only measure of journalism’s impact that matters: whether the public is informed.

We must begin by confessing the problem — and indeed the emergency. I recently attended two journalism conferences — one for the old newspaper industry, the other for the newer digital news industry — and neither tore open the agenda to grapple with this civic and journalistic emergency. In media, I see many specimens of its denial of responsibility.

I do not think we can just make incremental fixes to our old ways — a little more investigation, a little less sexism, a tad more intelligence, another dash of honesty (finally calling lies lies). We must fundamentally reinvent journalism: its relationship with the communities it serves, the forms it takes, the business models that support it.

Where to we start? Not with story ideas and pitches, not by assigning a reporter to a new beat, not by allocating space in a paper to more stories — all the things we used to do. I would start by sending a team made up of the smartest and most open-minded people from editorial, technology-design-data, and business (because this needs to be sustainable) to spend time with the community they will serve. I’d give them strict instructions: Listen. Observe. Don’t talk. Don’t test your ideas. Don’t interview them to get quotes. Just watch and listen. Learn about their problems and goals. Find out how they try to accomplish those goals now and what frustrates them. Ask what they believe they need to know. Listen for where they’re confused, wrong, worried, and curious. Empathize. Don’t come back until you can give me insights about their lives and needs. Bring me evidence of what you find out. Then build a new journalism around them.

If we can do this — better informing and building trust even with Trump’s community — we can do the same for any community.

We are not far from the end of the first year of our new degree in social journalism at CUNY and I couldn’t be prouder of what the students and the faculty are accomplishing. (If you are interested in being part of the second class, now is the time to apply.) My best accomplishment in helping to start this degree was recruiting the amazing Carrie Brown to head the program.

I am learning a great deal from Carrie and our students as we grapple with some fundamental questions about the nature of journalism as a service, about the idea of internally focused vs. externally focused journalism, and about a community’s definition of itself. We have been looking at whom we serve in a community — and whose behavior we thus set out to change. We have been asking what the appropriate measures of success — of impact and value — should be. We, of course, we are learning much about the impact of new social tools on journalism and gaining skills in that realm as a result.

And we are producing a class of high-powered pioneers. At the Online News Association confab in L.A. a week ago Carrie and I found employers dying to get their hands on our soon-to-be graduates. When Sarah Bartlett and I came up with the idea for this degree, we knew we were betting on the come: that news organizations would need the journalists we would educate in this program. A damned good bet.

I asked Carrie for an update for you about what our students are working on in their practicums (practica?) in the communities they have chosen to serve and in some cases in internships in media companies. A sample of their work:

* Pedro Burgos has been teaching himself to code beyond what he learned in class and has built a sentiment analyzer using IBM Watson’s API to allow him to examine what kinds of Facebook strategies produce the best comments and dialogue. He has interviewed experts in improving comments from around the country as well. Pedro loves to challenge me in class discussion and I relish that for through that we are exploring new metrics that should guide our work in journalism.

* Luis Miguel Echegaray is interning this semester at Vice. He is also live blogging soccer in Spanish for The Guardian, which has garnered them a lot of traffic. Luis is also working to build his The Faces of Soccer website. He is going to be working with South Bronx United, a nonprofit org that not only offers soccer coaching but school tutoring. Luis intends to become the Anthony Bourdain of soccer. He will succeed.

* Rachel Glickhouse is interning this semester at Medium. She’s also freelancing for a number of outlets, including Al Jazeera America and Quartz. We are impressed by how her work helped one man get his deportation stayed. At Medium, Rachel is assisting with audience engagement and involving journalism schools in an upcoming investigation. She’s also developing her practicum to start a conversation on Medium and social media about the difficulties of becoming a legal resident in the U.S.

* Deron Dalton is interning with the Daily Dot. In addition to other stories, he is using the expertise he has developed serving #BlackLivesMatter there. He is also developing resources for journalists on how to cover the movement.

* Julia Haslanger is working with Chalkbeat to study how the organization can continue to grow its readership and engagement. Her journalism salary survey – results posted on Medium – has gotten a lot of attention and reaction, and she was invited to speak at The Media Consortium as a result. She is also doing research for the Kettering Foundation, interviewing social media and community engagement editors in newsrooms to learn more about how they approach their jobs and the skills they need.

* Nuria Saldanha — who first completed our certificate in Entrepreneurial Journalism — conducted her first media skills training in partnership with the Facebook Innovation and Entrepreneurship Lab in the Heliópolis favela in São Paulo this August. People are learning how to use mobile devices to create text/photos/video. This is of particular benefit to small business that primarily use Facebook to promote their businesses. Facebook can use the Lab as a pilot project and expand it to other favelas and countries in Latin America. In collaboration with people she trains in media skills, she will produce 10 to 20 videos with elderly people from favelas, who are not familiar with the internet. Many of them migrated to the area while fleeing extreme poverty, moving São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro looking for a better life, but most ended up living in favelas and working in very low-skill jobs. She is also volunteering for BrazilFoundation, an organization that raises money to support social projects in Brazil, most of them related to her community.

* Emily Goldblum skipped the interim step of an internship when she was sought out for a job at The Odyssey. Her task there is to crowdsource stories from college students about a variety of topics. Her main goal is to diversify content with a specific focus on LGBTQ communities and has been working to cultivate more writers interested in writing about queer-focused topics.

* Aaron Simon has developed The Greenburg Post, an experimental community-journalism platform that seeks to collaborate with the residents and businesses that call North Brooklyn home. He has been reporting on a toxic Superfund site in the community and crowdsourcing stories and data about how the pollution has affected local residents.

* Sean Devlin is currently in Ireland interviewing Irish students who have participated in the J-1 graduate visa program, which allows them to spend 12 months in the United States interning and traveling. He has been serving the Irish community in New York for the past nine months and now went to the source to ask how social media (Facebook, Twitter, and WhatsApp) help Irish people in the U.S unite and get information.

* Erica Soto is working on a new kind of crowdfunding site for independent music artists. She writes: “SupportTour is Kickstarter meets Honeyfund for the indie musician on tour. At SupportTour, artists engage with fans by allowing them to participate in their tour experience. Instead of giving money for albums or studio space, fans purchase items directly for the artist. Just as Honeyfund allows users to register for honeymoon needs, artists will be able to register for tour needs such as hotel rooms, meals, additional gear and more. Fans then decide how they’d like to support the artists. They’ll even receive rewards when items are purchased. It could be a signed album, concert tickets, a secret Skype session or even a private dinner with their favorite artist. This is a chance for fans to become more involved with musicians on the road and for musicians to offer new incentive and creative fan experiences.”

* Adriele Parker’s goal is to “gather content to inform and share the stories of [African-Americans] that are suffering (or have suffered) from psychological disorders” and to reduce the stigma surrounding mental health issues. She has developed a “Our Stories in Light” podcast to share stories and it also continuing to develop a website.

* Betsy Laikin is building a media platform for women from the Middle East and North Africa currently residing in New York, in conjunction with her work at Women’s Voices Now. This will include community-produced written stories, audio podcasts, photography, and videos.

* Cristina Carnicelli Furlong organized an impressive roundtable with the American Society of Newspaper Editors and is building resources to educate reporters about how to cover pedestrian safety in New York.

In addition to all that, Carrie has announced a partnership with Storyful to train social journalists. Here’s some of what Carrie has learned so far.

If you are a journalist who wants to challenge the way that journalism services the public, then come apply. If you are an employer who wants these innovative journalists to help you change how you do journalism, let Carrie or me know.

At CUNY on July 16 and 17, we are holding our second annual summit for entrepreneurial journalism educators and combining it with our first annual summit for social journalism educators. Two, two, two mints in one.

We will start the day on Thursday, July 16 focusing on entrepreneurial journalism education, this year focusing on the teaching of design thinking and once again sharing best practices. That afternoon, we will join with social-journalism educators to share problems and solutions. And, because unconferences are de regueur, we’ll reserve time to break into discussions that you want to have. The next morning, we will shift our focus to social journalism education. Because this field is so new, we will focus on defining what social journalism is: definitions, pedagogical goals, and the relationship with mainstream journalism education.

My colleagues at CUNY — Jeremy Caplan from entrepreneurial journalism and Carrie Brown from social journalism — and I will share our experience teaching in both fields.

You should sign up and come if you teach or want to teach in either field. Everyone is welcome to stay for both halves as we figure there will be much overlap.

This was a great event last year at which we shared many best practices and solutions to each others’ problems. It is back by popular demand.

It took too long, but finally the attention of American journalism turned to Ferguson. Is the crush and focus of network cameras and big-paper reporters helping Ferguson or exploiting its struggle? The answer to that is obvious; see, for example, Newtown.

The better, more constructive question is: How could journalism help the residents of Ferguson?

The rationale behind our new, proposed M.A. in Social Journalism at CUNY — the thinking behind my argument that journalism must see itself as a service — is that journalism should start by listening, not speaking. It should start with hearing the needs of a community and then and only then deciding which tools to bring to bear to help a community meet its goals and improve its lot: reporting, explanation, education, convening, connecting, organizing.

As I try to apply these notions to Ferguson, a few observations:

It is, of course, possible now to listen in so many more ways. I was struck by this tweet that pictured community talking points about Michael Brown.

Protesters at Ferguson PD have "community talking points." Level of organization/calm right now almost unbelievable pic.twitter.com/t0nC41tUaW

When I retweeted that, a journalist objected that this is from an advocacy organization. Well, yes, of course. This group speaks for some people. The first question is: For whom does the organization speak? For whom does it not speak? What are the goals of the various communities in the town? Where are their disagreements? What in their discussion is correct? What is incorrect? What questions does the discussion raise? What information is missing? How can journalism help answer those questions? This document is a helpful starting point.

See, too, this post by a teacher in Greece advising members of a community — whether Ferguson or the Gaza Strip — how to use the tools now at their disposal to affect the conversation: don’t rely on or trust mainstream media but still cultivate them; use your own networks to distribute your own content; use Creative Commons to control use of your content in media. Now some would say that is the community as not only advocate but as flack: media manipulator. Of course. But that’s a mediacentric way to look at this. See it from the community’s perspective and it’s a statement of power: We have a voice at last.

There are more ways to listen to communities now because communities have a voice and ways to be heard. But the social journalist cannot just sit back and hear what people are saying on their blogs, in Twitter, and in their press conferences. The social journalist must also talk with the people who aren’t speaking and listen to them, asking them what their goals and needs are, what they know and don’t know and want to know and why.

When I posed my first question above — about service v. exploitation — on Twitter, I got a response from a resident of Ferguson:

@jeffjarvis as a Ferguson resident, feeling is 80% exploitation. This town is not what you see in the media.

My conversation with Mr. McCleery never left media: telling Ferguson’s story outside Ferguson. But what about telling the stories that will help Ferguson? It’s clear that showing up on someone’s doorstep and asking them what they need — “Hello, we’re corporate and we’re here to help” — is inadequate: journalism as focus group. This is why we will teach students to understand communities as best they can before they engage. They will use the tools I’ve listed above plus data skills to do that. But that is not sufficient. They will go meet people in the community — geographic or demographic, built around interest or event — and listen before speaking. They will observe and discern the community’s goals without imposing their own. That is why we think that social journalism must bring elements of social anthropology and community organizing to the task.

But what will be hardest to teach — what is hardest for me to learn — is tamping down the journalistic reflex to start with the assumption that we know what’s needed and that our stories will meet those needs. As I watch the news in Ferguson, I can’t help but do what an editor does, imagining stories to assign: on, say, the racial composition of the town and its history and tensions, on prior cases of police brutality, on the politics of the town — who’s in charge and how does that match the composition of the community, and so on. We call that news judgment.

But the truth is, of course, I don’t know Ferguson worth a damn. I don’t know what its needs are. I am in no position to decide how best to use precious journalistic resource to help them — let alone tell their story to the world.

In classic journalistic structure, the best person to try to do these things is the beat reporter, whose first job is to learn about the constituencies she covers, whether that’s a town or an agency or a topic. This is why I am working to grow the news ecosystems of New Jersey and New York with more beats; this is why we study their businesses at CUNY; this is why we are going to give intense training in running a beat business at the school this fall.

But not every community is lucky enough to have a beat reporter dedicated to its coverage and needs. And beat reporters classically still operate as story machines because that’s all they could do and that supports the economics of their business. But now, in the age of the net and social media, there are so many more ways to not only publish (and promote) but listen, so many more ways to understand a community’s needs and meet them, so many more ways to see people as individuals and communities rather than as a mass served with a necessarily one-size-fits-all product we called news.

It’s not going to be easy to turn journalism on its head, starting with listening rather than publishing, with serving the needs of a community over telling its story to others, and with judging one’s success on the community’s terms rather than media’s (those are the terms of service Jay Rosen has been challenging me to provide in this vision of service journalism).

@jeffjarvis Doesn't your journalism-as-a-service vision require a redefinition of "terms of service" into a contract people can understand?

I don’t know what Ferguson needs. I know that the country needs to pay attention to what is happening in the town and so I’m glad that social media — that is, people using social media to report what they witness — forced Ferguson’s issues onto national media. I also know that it won’t be long before the town will get sick of that attention and of the sensationalism that will emphasize everything bad about Ferguson and nothing good: simple stories that can be told in 1:30 of time or 13″ of type. I also know that when the reporters leave Ferguson’s McDonald’s and the satellite trucks rumble off its streets, then Ferguson will be left little better off for all the journalism that occurred there. It will still have needs and goals and could use help to meet them. That is where social journalism begins.

Some have asked for more detail about the MA in social journalism we are developing at CUNY. Here are major excerpts from the formal proposal that I wrote (well-edited by our dean, Sarah Bartlett). I’m sparing you sections on the facilities. The syllabi will be works in progress until we bring on the faculty to teach the courses; I’ll share those later. As ever, I am eager to hear your thoughts and questions. Link to the Google doc here; PDF here.

Some big news at CUNY: We are developing a new master’s degree in social journalism. We’ve considered calling it a degree in community information and engagement. I will also argue that it is a degree in outcomes-based journalism. It is all those things. Allow me to explain.

I have been arguing for some time that journalism must shift from seeing itself primarily as a producer of content for masses to become more explicitly a service to individuals and communities. Content fills things; service accomplishes things. To provide a service with relevance and value requires knowing those you serve, and to do that requires building relationships with those people. Thus, we must learn relationship skills.

I’ve written about these ideas in the first third of a white paper on new relationships, new forms, and new business models for news that I’ve been working on for a while. (I posted that first third, on relationships, at Medium.) On a trip to California to talk with Reid Hoffman, Ev Williams, Dick Costolo, Vic Gundotra, Bradley Horowitz, and other technology leaders about the future of news, I subjected my new dean, Sarah Bartlett, to the unfinished essay so she’d be forewarned of what I’d be preaching. On the flight out, having completed everything else she had to work on and with a three-hour delay ahead and a crying baby behind, she had nothing left to do but read it. When she got off the plane, Sarah said she agreed with much of what I said. But she also asked whether we would need to find new ways to teach the new skills I’d outlined.

So she suggested a new degree to add to our core MA in journalism and entrepreneurial journalism degrees, and she sketched what it might look like. I wrote a proposal, outlining the curriculum and goals. She presented it to the faculty. My colleagues did an incredible job writing syllabi, which our curriculum committee and faculty just approved. There are more steps yet to walk in this process — seeking approval from the university and the state — before we can formally announce and recruit students. But since we are on the path, I thought it was time to put a stake in the ground and welcome a discussion regarding social journalism and what it is.

First, let me say what it is not. In a series of interesting posts, Ed Sussman has been labeling as social journalism what Forbes, Gawker, the Guardian, and others are doing in inviting contributors to write for their sites. I disagree. That idea continues to keep the focus of journalism on us, our products, our content; it’s a more open (to its credit) and less reliable (to its frequent discredit) way to feed the media beast.

No, I say that social journalism must turn the telescope around and start with the public, with the people being served. The first skill we will teach in this new program is listening to a community, hearing and discerning its needs and then thinking about how best to help it meet those needs. The answer sometimes — often — will be reporting and content. But it can also mean connecting the members of the community to each other to share information themselves. It can mean sharing data and tools rather than developing narratives. It can mean helping a community to organize itself to take action (yes, that’s community organizing). It can be education. It must be collaborative.

Social journalists will judge their success not by the old-media metrics of reach and frequency — or, translated to digital argot, of unique users and pageviews — for those measures are still about our stuff and who sees it. Though social journalism may sound like and use many of the tools of what is known as social media, I will also argue that the proper measurements of success are not likes and friends and shares and even how much time and attention we get from the public — the things we have been calling engagement — for those, too, are about engaging with us and our stuff.

Social journalists will judge their success instead by whether the public they serve and its members accomplish their goals, meet their needs, improve their lots and their communities — and whether they connect with each other to better understand each other through discussion and information. Thus I see this as the discipline of outcomes-based journalism: We take responsibility not only for making a product called news, hoping people consume it and then hoping that they and their communities are better for it. That’s all we could do before, in print and broadcast. Now, online, we have new tools and new means to hear the public, to serve the public, and to measure our impact and value. There lies the essence of social journalism.

So, yes, it’s social but it’s not just about social media. Yes, it’s about engagement but not engagement with us but instead about a community’s engagement with its own work. It’s about results, outcomes, impact.

To teach these skills, we are proposing a three-term, year-long program with:
* two journalism courses — one on identifying, meeting, and listening to communities, the next on presenting information to and helping inform a community;
* two listening courses — the first helping students to interact with and learn from diverse communities, the second about the ethics (and legalities) of working with and serving a community;
* two data courses — about using data as a means to listen to and learn about a community, to gather information with and from a community, to present information to a community, and to measure the impact of working with a community;
* two tools courses — understanding how best to use the many platforms communities use and will use to connect and share, and also learning how to work with technologists to adapt tools to help communities;
* intense business training (a subset of beat-business training we are offering this summer at CUNY — more on that shortly); and
* an intense practicum serving a community of the student’s choice, working to meet goals of the community’s definition.

We will bring in teachers with various skills to work with students — journalists, of course, and also data specialists and community organizers and social anthropologists and more.

If approved, this new degree will be taught alongside CUNY’s MA in journalism and MA and certificate in entrepreneurial journalism. Each will attract distinct cohorts of students seeking a variety of jobs (note that the Center for Investigative Reporting depends on six engagement editors and Al Jazeera’s new AJ Plus is hiring 13 people of that description) or starting their own ventures. We have talked with many leaders in the field and they have convinced us there is a need and demand for this program and its graduates. Each of our degree programs will have a positive impact on the others, bringing new skills and perspectives to the school and adding courses and options for all the students. At CUNY, we pride ourselves on being a startup still, on learning as we go and adapting our curriculum to new needs and opportunities. This new program is also part of that process.

We are operating on what passes — in our field — for a fast track. If we pass all our tests, we hope to offer the new degree in 2015 (we haven’t decided yet exactly when). Between now and then — and here is the reason I am writing this — I would like to hear your suggestions and questions about what and how we should teach. We’ve received very helpful reaction from our school’s board of advisers and other friends. On that trip to the Bay Area, Sarah and I discussed our idea with most everyone we met and met in turn with gratifying enthusiasm.

Indeed, I am honored to tell you that Reid Hoffman — who has given me very useful advice about the entrepreneurial journalism program since its inception — is generously seeding the development of the new degree. And we just learned that the Knight Foundation — the preeminent funder for journalism in America — will match Reid’s gift. Thank you, both.

We will be raising additional money to fund scholarships, research on engagement and impact, and events bringing together researchers and practitioners from various fields to discuss social journalism and engagement under the auspices of the Tow-Knight Center.

Just when I thought things were starting to settle down in our eight-year startup of a journalism school…..